KAHLIL JOSEPH: SHADOW PLAY, HELEN JOHNSON: ENDS Set for New Museum This Fall

The New Museum announces added details on its lineup of exhibitions for its fall 2017 season, including the premiere of two new galleries and a storefront window space.

On September 27, the exhibitions "Kahlil Joseph: Shadow Play" and "Petrit Halilaj: RU" will inaugurate the Museum's South Galleries, the first phase of the Museum's expansion into its adjacent building at 231 Bowery. The Museum will present "Alex Da Corte: Harvest Moon" as the debut installation in a new storefront window display in 231 Bowery.

On September 13, the Museum will open "Helen Johnson: Ends" in its Lobby Gallery, premiering a new series of paintings for the artist's first exhibition in an American institution. These exhibitions join "Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon," the Museum's lead exhibition of its fall 2017 season.

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"Kahlil Joseph: Shadow Play"
September 27, 2017-January 7, 2018
South Galleries, Ground Floor

In his captivating short films, Los Angeles-based artist and filmmaker Kahlil Joseph (b. 1981, Seattle, WA) conjures the lush and impressionistic quality of dreams with particular reverence for quotidian moments and intimate scenes. Music always figures centrally in Joseph's works, in which sounds reverberate as vital and powerful analogues for the play of images through which he chronicles the stories and rhythms of his subjects. As much as they plumb the history of cinema and moving images, Joseph's films also find a parallel in the lyricism, complexity, and affective power of black musical traditions.

In "Kahlil Joseph: Shadow Play," his first solo presentation in New York, Joseph will debut Fly Paper (2017), a new film installation that departs from his admiration of the work of Roy DeCarava (1919-2009), a photographer and artist known for his images of celebrated jazz musicians and everyday life in Harlem. With Fly Paper, Joseph extends DeCarava's virtuosity with chiaroscuro effects to the moving image and brings together a range of film and digital footage to contemplate the dimensions of past, present, and future in Harlem and New York City. Joseph's new film also touches on themes of filiation, influence, and legacy, marking a personal reckoning that intuitively calls upon his connections to the city through his family-in particular, his late father, whom he cared for in Harlem at the end of his life. Fly Paper's dynamic yet contemplative mood also builds on Joseph's sense that layers of lived experience-and stories-are sedimented in the places that have played host to the aspirations and daily lives of countless individuals.

Harlem's renown as the epicenter of black culture in the US is at the heart of Fly Paper, and Joseph's film draws on an interplay of artistic forms as much as it engages his current relationship to an accomplished community of black artists, writers, actors, and musicians who call New York home. With its references to literature and narration, Fly Paper also probes the ways in which the literary imagination parallels that of film and how the ordinary act of storytelling gives shape to larger histories or enduring myths. Installed as a large-scale projection with enveloping soundscapes, Fly Paper will compose a polyphonic portrait of black art and culture in New York City that invites a meditation on the slippery nature of memory, reverie, and the photographic image. "Kahlil Joseph: Shadow Play" is curated by Natalie Bell, Assistant Curator, and Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director.

"Kahlil Joseph: Shadow Play" and "Petrit Halilaj: RU" also debut the first phase of the Museum's expansion in its adjacent building at 231 Bowery, connected to the Museum's lobby. With galleries designated for premiering new productions at the Museum, the exhibition spaces preserve the character of the building's original loft spaces, where many artists historically worked and exhibited.

"Petrit Halilaj: RU"
September 27, 2017-January 7, 2018
South Galleries, Ground Floor

Petrit Halilaj (b. 1986, Kostërrc, Skenderaj-Kosovo) often uses his own biography as a point of departure, adopting exhibition processes to alter the course of private and collective histories. Encompassing sculpture, drawing, text, and video, many of Halilaj's works incorporate materials from his native Kosovo and manifest as ambitious spatial installations through which the artist translates personal relationships into sculptural forms.

For his New Museum exhibition, Halilaj will present a major new project that begins in Runik, the city in which he was born and the site of one of the earliest Neolithic settlements in the region, where some of Kosovo's most significant artifacts have been found. An archaeological dig in the town uncovered 505 objects that comprise part of the country's most significant material history from the period, including the musical instrument known as the Runik Ocarina. Now spread across several countries as the result of the Kosovo War in the 1990s, the most valuable of these objects currently reside in storage at the Natural History Museum in Belgrade. Out of public reach and inaccessible to the people of Runik, these objects hold great symbolic value for a nation missing parts of its shared frame of reference, but also point to the condition of contradictory claims from several countries in the region made upon the same material heritage. In "Petrit Halilaj: RU," Halilaj presents a number of new video works, several large fabric sculptures, and an extensive environment that will draw on his research on the flight patterns and habitats of migratory birds. The artist's real and imagined narratives began from recollections by Runik's own inhabitants of discoveries on this site. While their material proof has been lost, these narratives merge into complete stories of origin, shaped by Halilaj into large sculptural forms.

Halilaj has recreated the 505 found objects in the form of migratory birds who have temporarily taken residence in an imagined landscape, envisioning these artifacts as beings who live and thrive through movement, rather than belonging to any one site or context. Bringing these objects together for the first time, Halilaj leaves behind the idea that this collection should define one nation. With "RU," he instead presents a history written through personal narratives, and understands collective histories as flexible entities defined through movement and temporary residence-ultimately proposing how objects could serve a very different purpose in the context of museums. The exhibition is curated by Helga Christoffersen, Assistant Curator.

"Helen Johnson: Ends"
September 13, 2017-January 14, 2018
Lobby Gallery, Ground Floor

For over a decade, Helen Johnson (b. 1979, Melbourne, Australia) has used painting as a tool to investigate issues around the legacy of colonialism, the construction of national identity, personal history, and contemporary politics in her native Australia. Johnson's densely layered canvases incorporate historical imagery ranging from political cartoons, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century painting, architectural diagrams and maps, fragments of bodies, and handwritten text rendered with a variety of painterly gestures. Often double-sided and scaled to the human body, Johnson's works are arranged in carefully composed installations, positioning the viewer at the intersection of a broad range of cultural and historical influences. Although driven by a deep and rigorous process of historical research, her works adopt a playful and even humorous take on historical memory and ingrained social conventions. "Helen Johnson: Ends" is the artist's first exhibition in an American institution. For her presentation in the Museum's Lobby Gallery, she will produce a new series of paintings that extend her broader thematic concerns, while maintaining her experimental approach to the material and the communicative possibilities of painting as a critical medium. "Helen Johnson: Ends" is curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Curator.

"Alex Da Corte: Harvest Moon"
September 27, 2017-January 7, 2018
Storefront Window, Ground Floor

Philadelphia-based artist Alex Da Corte (b. 1980, Camden, NJ) will create a new work for the inaugural installation in the storefront window of the New Museum's 231 Bowery building. Da Corte's project will be the first in a new series that pays homage to the window installations that the New Museum mounted in the 1980s, which included now-legendary projects by Jeff Koons ("The New," 1980), David Hammons ("Rented Earth," 1980), Linda Montano ("Seven Years of Living Art," 1984-91), and Bruce Nauman ("No, No, No, No, No!," 1987), among others.

Da Corte's vibrant paintings, sculptures, videos, and installations infuse everyday artifacts with symbolic power. Drawing from the visual iconography of his outer-Philadelphia upbringing, Da Corte creates theatrical assemblages that combine personal narratives and remixed references with the glossy aesthetics of commercial culture. Through subtle manipulation, repurposing, and juxtaposition of objects and icons, he unearths the eerie and absurd qualities that underlie the seemingly familiar. At once dazzling and ominous, his surreal amalgams chart the psychological complexities, desires, and illusions that haunt late-capitalist culture. "Alex Da Corte: Harvest Moon" is curated by Margot Norton, Curator.

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The New Museum is the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to contemporary art. Founded in 1977, the New Museum is a center for exhibitions, information, and documentation about living artists from around the world. From its beginnings as a one-room office on Hudson Street to the inauguration of its first freestanding building on the Bowery designed by SANAA in 2007, the New Museum continues to be a place of experimentation and a hub of new art and new ideas.